RAM problem, help

danielthesea

Baseband Member
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22
Location
Argentina
Hello everyone, few weeks ago the famous "blue screens" started to show up which made me decide to run a Memtest.

I left it running for around 2 days and errors appeared. I have 2 dimms one is 2gb and the other 4gb, and I wanted to know which one was damaged, so I ran memtests with only one of them installed, and I also tested them changing the slots where they were installed.

Result, when testing the dimms separetely no errors showed up, I put them back together and ran another test and there were errors again

could it be the motherboard? just a coincidence that memtest didn't show errors when trying them separately?

Thanks for your help!!
 
Just about all motherboards use dual channel memory, which means the both board and memory manufactures highly recommend that both memory sticks be the same size, make and model numbers.
It sounds like the memory modules are not compatible with each other, you should get a dual channel memory kit (two sticks of memory in the same package)
 
Just about all motherboards use dual channel memory, which means the both board and memory manufactures highly recommend that both memory sticks be the same size, make and model numbers.
It sounds like the memory modules are not compatible with each other, you should get a dual channel memory kit (two sticks of memory in the same package)

They are the same size and model, they even came with the laptop, just different capacity
 
Still, different sized modules can cause issues, the only other issue that could be at play is a faulty memory controller and it has issues with two modules at the same time.

Either get 2x2GB sticks, or get 2x4GB sticks

By the way, size isn't physical, it's the capacity, and if they are the same model stick, one wouldn't be 2GB and the other wouldn't be 4GB.
 
Nope, not really, no way to test it, and it's built into the CPU... The closest you can get to testing it, is by testing a set of memory sticks that are the exact same size and speed in both slots at the same time.
 
Some boards are more finicky than others about memory, Some you can slap any mis-matched pair in and they run fine and other boards won't boot at all.
I have two Asrock boards, both the same model and version number. I bought a matched pair of DDR2 x 2gb and one board boots and runs fine and if I put that same memory in the other same model number board....it doesn't boot up at all.
Go figure, I'm clueless on that one because I put one 2gb stick and one 1gb stick of mis-matched memory and that board runs fine
 
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Joe, did both boards have the same CPU moved between them? Or is it one of the older boards that still had the controller built into the north bridge? A lot of the issue comes to the controller it self and not the actual board most the time.
 
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